We've had superheroes who actually hold some sort of power, and we've had normal folks pretending their super, but how about possible delusion, or secret superhero traits that lead you to spell poorly? As The Hollywood Reporter posts, Woody Harrelson and Sandra Oh are starring in a new film called Defendor, and Playlist-loving Kat Dennings is looking to join in on the fun. Woody will play a man who thinks he has a secret superhero identity, while Oh plays his shrink and Dennings would play a teen he becomes friends with. As a superhero, what sort of powers would suit Woody best? Leaping over buildings in a single bound? Tingling Spider sense? Stay tuned!

In the rumor realm, we've got buzz bubbling about a third Coco Chanel project (like two aren't enough). Beyond the TV movie with Shirley MacLaine and the feature with Audrey Tatou, The Guardian posts that there might be a third starring, believe it or not, Demi Moore. I guess the look is right, but could Mrs. Kutcher pull off a period piece -- one focused on an icon no less? (And just in case Coco isn't enough for you, the report also states that there are rumors about Vivienne Westwood and Kate Moss heading to the big screen.) *UPDATE: Westwood is on her way, with Kate Winslet signed to play the icon.

Now this next bit isn't exactly casting news, but it could become that -- Variety reports that Kevin Bacon is executive producing a new series for Showtime that dips into the life of Honest Abe's infamous assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Considering how well John Adams did, I wouldn't be surprised if Bacon grabs Booth's role for himself. There's a fair likeness.

Plus: Ex-Boston Legal star Rhona Mitra is heading to Separation City, and the ever lovely Beth Grant is dabbing in Extract.

We already know that Renee Zellweger is running towards Chris Noth in My One and Only, but who is she running from? There are lots of creepy possibilities in the Hollywood talent pool (who would make a believable love interest for Zellweger) -- actors like Javier Bardem, Crispin Glover, Cillian Murphy, and of course -- Kevin Bacon.

Variety reports that the cave dwelling, wild thing, hollow, woodsman has signed for the film, which has already started shooting in Baltimore. Based on George Hamilton's memories of his youth, the feature focuses on a road trip with mom, as she drives around looking for a rich man to complete the family. Bacon has landed the role of "the philandering band leader she tries to leave behind."

I've no doubt that Bacon will pull it off nicely, since creepy fare has become a second skin to the actor, but oh, how I'd like to see him in something lighter and fun, or serious, but not dark. He's a footlooser, for cripes sakes! Other suitors for Mamma Anne include Steven Weber and Nick Stahl (talk about traversing the possible ages), while George will be played by Logan Lerman, and his brother will be played by Mark Rendall.

A dedicated contributor to the Ain't it Cool News machine got the chance to catch what they claimed was the final cut of Ron Howard's political drama, Frost/Nixon, and the good news is that it earned a resounding thumbs up (if you make it through the entire review, there is also a little surprise regarding the Arrested Development feature). Frost/Nixon is based on the famous stage play by Peter Morgan, which premiered in 2007 and earned Frank Langella a Tony for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play.

In 1977, Frost, as the host of a popular news show titled Frost on America, conducted a series of hard-hitting interviews with Richard Nixon. Nixon had been interviewed countless times before, but Frost was perhaps the only journalist to ever get him to admit his culpability in the Watergate break-in. Morgan adapted his own play for the screen, and it centers on Frost's team as well as re-enactments of the interviews.

Reprising their roles are Frank Langella as the disgraced former President Nixon, and Michael Sheen as British journalist, David Frost. Joining Langella and Sheen are Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, and Sam Rockwell as James Reston Jr. Judging by AICN's tipster, it looks like most of the praise will be directed at Langella's stellar performance as the former president. So for those of you who like to get an early jump on your Oscar pool, you might want to keep Langella in mind. Frost/Nixon goes into limited release on December 5th.

After Paris, je t'aime, it was only a matter of time before the cinematic spotlight turned to New York. Last May, word popped up that New York, I Love You was in the works, with a roster including Zach Braff, Mira Nair, Park Chan-Wood, and Fatih Akin. In January, Scarlett Johansson and Woody Allen signed on to the project as well. The big surprise, however, was that Scarlett would be helming her own short, rather than appearing in Woody's.

According to the Daily Mail, she just shot hers the other day in Brooklyn, and they've got a bunch of pictures of her doing her thang. It must've been cold out there, seeing that she looks like a fashionable Eskimo in the one pic. While nothing about the plot was revealed, her short is said to be 5 minutes long, and features the '80s dance master Kevin Bacon. That's not a bad gig, and even more impressive that it's for a feature film, rather than a fashion magazine's short film series (not to knock the shorts that have come from it!).

The piece also talks about her burgeoning singing career, and how David Bowie just about loves her. He's quoted as saying: "Scarlett's performances are mystical and cool. She creates a mood that could have been summoned by someone like the novelists Margery Latimer or Jeanette Winterson." That's some mighty praise. I'm not sure I completely agree with the comparison, but how about you?

It is interesting to learn that filmmaker Jieho Lee has a fondness for the ending of Fellini's Nights of Cabiria. However, it is not so interesting to realize that he can't let go of this fondness enough to create a genuine film moment of his own. For instance, there is one significant scene in Lee's The Air I Breathe that plays so much like an homage to the final shot of Cabiria that it takes away from the actual film it is a part of. The scene involves a major character's death, so it's hard to go into detail without spoiling it for you, but I can say that recognizing the blatant tribute may cause you to feel less for that character than you should otherwise during that scene. After all, it is difficult to care about a character that comes off as simply a tool for Lee's unnecessary acknowledgment, or re-creation, of a part of a favorite film.

Maybe I just shouldn't read a film's press notes prior to watching it (I don't usually), as I might not have caught the homage without noting Lee's mention of Cabiria in his director's statement. And perhaps I wouldn't have been thinking about Lee's other influences, from The Wizard of Oz to Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss, and unfairly comparing The Air I Breathe to them. But it doesn't matter, because The Air I Breathe would still feel completely derivative without knowledge of the exact works that inspired Lee. To me, despite what I learned from the press notes, the film was mostly reminiscent of Inarritu's Amores Perros, and not only because of where it was filmed, how it interconnects multiple stories or the fact that it features a bank robbery, a female celebrity confined to an apartment and an obligatory car accident of some kind.

Growing up, my two favorite comedians were Steve Martin and John Candy. My favorite filmmaker was John Hughes. And yet I was never allowed to see the collaboration of my three heroes -- Planes, Trains and Automobiles, because it was Rated "R" and my parents are mean. When I finally broke my father down and was permitted to watch it, I treasured every moment. And I still do. Maybe it's the years of anticipation that made the film so special to me, but it easily ranks among my very favorite comedies of all time.

John Hughes was in the midst of an amazing hot streak in 1987. He had written the screenplays for hits like Mr. Mom, National Lampoon's Vacation, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful. His first four films as a writer/director had been Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, four of the most important films of my youth (and a lot of peoples' youths). Planes, Trains and Automobiles was a bit of a departure for Hughes -- an "adult" comedy, with nary a teenager in sight. Thankfully, Hughes knew the complicated world of adult relationships and feelings just as well as he did that of teens.

Martin plays Neal Page, an uptight advertising man who is trying to get from New York to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving. John Candy plays Del Griffith, a slobby shower curtain ring salesman who is headed the same direction as Neal. For better or worse, they wind up taking the trip together. Tale as old as time. But beautiful writing, pitch-perfect performances, and a surprisingly powerful undercurrent of emotion make Planes, Trains and Automobiles the buddy comedy by which all others must be judged.

Almost two years ago, back in January of 2006, Cinematical first posted about the upcoming film called The Air I Breathe. While it went away for a bit, the film is finally gearing up for limited release in January, and a trailer has made its way online, courtesy of Aglet Productions. Coming from writer/director Jieho Lee (and co-written with Bob DeRosa), Breathe is a drama based on the Chinese proverb that says life is based on four emotional elements -- happiness, pleasure, sorrow, and love. Sure, this sounds like a film with four unrelated vignettes, but it's actually looking to be a rather dark story where each emotion intertwines with the others.

Lee uses them to tell the stories of a businessman who bets his life on a horse (Forest Whitaker as Happiness), a gangster who can see the future (Brendan Fraser as Pleasure), a popstar who falls victim to a crime boss (Sarah Michelle Gellar as Sorrow), and a doctor trying to save the love of his life (Kevin Bacon as love). As if that wasn't enough for a solid starter cast, the film also boasts the likes of Andy Garcia, Emile Hirsch, and Julie Delpy. All of these people are interconnected through a dark and seemingly desperate backdrop. The only thing that's funny about all of this is that Gellar is playing a woman famous for her singing and dancing (she sings when she has to, but as Once More with Feeling will attest, she's no an American Idol). Still, it's a good trailer, and if these clips are any indication, it should be one heck of a film. And at the very least, it's got to be better than Southland Tales!

[via Empire Online]

In Perfection, they say there's nothing new under the sun. But under the ground...

The horror/comedy film almost never works, because it requires a nearly impossible tone to nail. It's hard to be too scared if you're laughing, and it's hard to laugh if you're scared. When writers and directors do pull it off -- Gremlins 1 and 2, the Evil Dead series, the recent Slither -- it's an incredibly enjoyable genre. And to me, the shining example may just be the 1990 cult classic Tremors.

The film is about underground creatures that track their prey by sensing vibrations. It's a pretty genius idea for a horror flick, one of those perfect why-didn't-anyone-think-of-this-before concepts. Having the creatures come from below is something of a masterstroke for a low-budget film, because for large chunks of screen time the monster can be implied rather than shown.

The smaller budget of Tremors pushes the filmmakers to be as creative as possible with their monsters. In addition to the awesome cinematography, which includes Sam Raimi-style camera tricks and monster POV shots, just about every creature feature trick in the book is employed, including hand puppets! There are only a couple of moments that don't quite look believable, but the shagginess is a big part of the movie's massive charm.

And the monsters, when we do see them, are really pretty sweet. There's a great documentary on the DVD where, among other things, you learn that the original creature design was scrapped because everyone thought it looked exactly like a penis. So even if the effects might not be up to today's CGI-heavy standards, you can at least be thankful you're not watching Attack of the Dicks.

A revenge thriller is a tough animal to tame. Go too far in one direction and you're practically advocating vigilante behavior -- but if you err on the safe side your drama begins to feel like a flaccid little network flick. Third-time director James Wan (Saw, Dead Silence) deserves some hearty praise for trying to balance hard-edged escapism with some surprisingly ambiguous social commentary -- even if the two approaches sometimes mix as well as oil and vinegar. But "more than half a brain" is what this dark-hued action thriller has to offer, and nowadays that's just enough to get excited about. (Had the flick been full-bore bloodthirstiness, I suspect it would have gotten really tiresome after about 25 minutes or so.)

Fortunately Mr. Wan also has Kevin Bacon in the lead role -- as an All-American dad who seeks revenge on the brutal drug gang members who murdered his son -- and if ever a genre movie hinged on a lead performance, it's Death Sentence. Bacon is able to be "the perfect dad" without being too sappy or cloying; he has no trouble creating a character who's being gradually sucked down the tubes; and once Bacon gets down to the very end of his rope -- he has no problem selling himself as a desperate shell who simply wants some justice revenge ... ok, both.

While Kevin Bacon was absent from the Death Sentence breakfast, we did manage to corral Garrett Hedlund over eggs and ... bacon. He talked to us about starring in the movie, his relationships with co-stars Kevin Bacon and John Goodman, how he grew up with guns, and shooting very long action sequences with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Garrett Hedlund isn't a household name just yet, but you've probably seen him on the big screen at Patrocles in Troy. He played the brash, young cousin of Achilles (Brad Pitt), and is somewhat of a chameleon. He's also been in Friday Night Lights, Eragon, and Four Brothers. With a shaved head and tribal neck tattoos in Death Sentence, he's looking to extend that streak. Click on his picture for the audio interview and read the highlights below.

• He plays Billy Darly, the son of Bones Darly (John Goodman) and is the older brother of Joe Darly (Matt O'Leary).
• He leads a gang of thugs who run a meth lab in an abandoned insane asylum. Sounds like a nice place.
• There is a great scene between John Goodman and Kevin Bacon in the movie, where John realizes that Kevin Bacon is after his son ... who in turn had killed Kevin's son.
• He's worked with everyone from Brad Pitt, to Terrence Howard, to Billy Bob Thornton, but his dad was most impressed when he told him he was working with John Goodman. "He finally feels proud of me."
• "I don't care for working with actors that just come in and read the lines and pretend that the character is them, instead of them the character. A lot of people think that they're the one to bank off of, as their personality as a celebrity. They feel that people just want to see them. Where I like trying to do something different with each role."
• They did extensive research for the role by gathering as a "gang" at strip clubs and bars, and calling each other by their gang names.
• "I had my rifle permit when I was eleven, kids couldn't wait to deer hunt ... even girls. I grew up with an environment of guns. I've always used them, and always learned how to be safe with them. If I did something like pointing the gun at the sun or did anything stupid with it, I'd get slapped in the back of the head."